


briars

by cartographicalspine



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Multi, Pre-Relationship, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22216696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographicalspine/pseuds/cartographicalspine
Summary: You never saw the last bloom of Highever's roses.
Relationships: Alistair/Cousland (Dragon Age), Cousland/Anora Mac Tir
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	briars

**Author's Note:**

> Cousland survives the events of the human noble origin without Duncan. All the other origins survived in similar fashion without being recruited, with the exception of the Dalish Warden Mahariel, mentioned briefly at the end. Tabris makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in the middle. Alistair and Anora became Ferelden's monarchs and there is an implied pre-relationship between the three characters (Cousland, Anora, and Alistair) at the end.

The last roses of Highever, shy and prickly, lingered in your mind's eye like burrs on your coat when you cut through the briars in the meadow to make curfew. You raised your eyes to them as your mother drilled pride and duty into your young, foolish heart.

You sighed.

_I think I'm in love._

Your mother never tolerated your whims as your father did, her gaze sharpening like daggers while your father simply laughed and squeezed your shoulder. 

_There will be others,_ was her stiff comfort at sending you away from home, from your beloved. _Don't mope like that, it doesn't suit a Cousland._

_You're wrong, Eleanor, my dear. I've never known a Cousland who hasn't wilted like a rose in failed love._

Father's words prompted a swift response from Mother, and you let their argument wash over you without really absorbing it in favor of wishing the tiny, almost-red buds would open.

They bloomed while you were away, and autumnal golds welcomed you in their stead when your horse finally reached the coast. Your sweetheart had long moved on.

 _Next summer,_ Mother said. _They'll blossom again, as will your heart, my sweet, silly boy._

You did see rose red that winter, splattered all over the floors and walls, a garden blooming from the bodies of your loved ones. Snow lingered late that year in Highever, burying it in bitter, stark swathes even as you abandoned the teyrnir entirely. Your heart, like one of those tiny buds, lay buried under a shroud of ice with it.

Gilmore didn't like to talk about those first days, the weeks you lay like pale death, frozen and unmoving. You thought they were preferable, because what followed was worse. News from Ostagar, from Redcliffe and Denerim. The shroud thawed as civil war and blight churned the earth at springtime, and you could not lie senseless anymore. Moving, growing... that hurt, but with it stirred anger and rage, a poison so strong you stopped feeling it.

When your parents had that garden put in the atrium, they agreed on only one flower. Your mother, longing for the sea, preferred the hardy, reedy sea grasses and blooms. Your father, heart forever in the woods with his rebel countrymen, chose bright tangles of forest flowers. The rose, they both loved. 

_Bright_ , Father sighed, _and devoted._

Mother smiled. _It defends itself. It fights._

Your father always pricked his fingers on the thorns. Your mother never did.

But those roses, fearless and beautiful, grew sick without warning. The gardener and your parents tended them well, but so much was cut away.

 _A type of rot,_ Brother Aldous told you. _They sicken from the inside and grow wrong. Twisted and ruined and spreading their deformation as far as they can._

You found it within yourself, something contorted and tight that grew with the war and the blight and the stunted grief. You tried to cut it out, tried to claw through all the thorns that had grown there.

There were so very many thorns.

You were found there, sobbing and bleeding with your hands twisted around the dagger, Howe slumbering in his bed just mere paces away. He was under a sleeping draught, one for which you had the counteragent tucked into your belt; you wanted him awake for it. Erlina's interests were for her mistress, but perhaps she saw more value in you alive than dead once the arl woke to find you, catatonic, at the foot of his bed. She and her companion, an elven woman from the Alienage with the most fiery pair of copper eyes you had ever seen, dragged you out before you could do more damage to yourself than what the guards did as you fled.

How Gilmore gave you the verbal lashing of your life, how Erlina tutted as she bandaged the fingers you ruined on the edge of your blade, how the queen simply watched you like a curious thing. 

(She spoke to you of her mother’s roses much, much later, how contorted and broken they were when they died under her father’s touch. You no longer wondered if it was pity she felt then; you knew better at that point.)

Stripping the rancor and hostility was long, bloody work, thorns in the soft flesh of your hands, and the poison ran so deep as to nearly kill you. But roses grow anew after the shearing and lopping, and though there was more black rot in your heart than willpower, you saw the end through. New thorns for defending, for fighting, because Howe was not the end of all things for you. Your life was more than a frozen rosebud in the snow in Highever. Roses did not grow alone.

You saw justice done, of course, but it was not your dagger that grazed his lung and left him drowning in his own blood in the minutes it took him to die. The Couslands were not the only ones he hurt. The so-called vengeance you abandoned was not the center of the world, not when Howe’s basement and arlings were filled with tortured, wronged subjects. Perhaps you would have preferred a trial, but he chose his poison in the end. You almost smiled at the thought and let the last bitter sting bleed out of your heart. And then you wept.

The archdemon’s death saw a renewing Denerim in spring, heavy rains not quite washing the black ichor away entirely. They rebuilt the broken and damaged, though buildings came together more easily than lives and country. The season opened to a new court under the king and queen: sons and daughters taking over for their lost fathers and mothers, the elder nobility doing the same for the children they lost. You and your brother learned what power means without a house. You had a name and your upbringing, you had the memory of love and loss; you had your brother’s sobs on your shoulder and your dog’s head on your lap. Often, it was the latter that got you through the former, and you grew back in adversity as you had in comfort and privilege. 

Summer would see the return of the Cousland heraldry to Highever, and you and your brother were in assembly with the nobility to oversee the rebalance of power to Ferelden. New border lines were constantly drawn and redrawn as the talks went on, and recesses such as this one were aplenty. The royal gardens were a welcome respite from the stuffy assembly chamber, and you breathed in air that had not seen an archdemon’s miasma in months. The roses were blooming.

_Are you enjoying our garden, my lord?_

You bowed to your king and queen, reflexive and smooth after a season working at their side with the Bannorn. The queen spoke more easily to you, having known you in the days after your failed assassination attempt against Howe. She knew your misfortunes and misdeeds. Her expression, while solemn, held understanding. The king had only ever known you as the younger brother at the new Teyrn Cousland’s side, and yet his stiff frown softened as you withdrew your hand from the rose petals.

He shrugged a shoulder, casual and charming, and nodded back at the palace doors. _Brings people together, doesn’t it?_

At your startled look, the king smiled wry and slow, like he was sharing a secret between the three of you. _The Blight was a dark time, and this certainly isn’t easier. What, Anora? I like to point out the positives to keep things light._

He had a reputation for easy grace and charm, but you hadn’t had the good fortune of experiencing it yourself within all the long, draining reconstruction efforts. It made him look much younger, and it brought a soft glow to the queen’s cheeks. They seemed their age, for once, and it occurred to you that they were still quite young, however long the Blight and the war felt to have stretched on. With lowered gaze and a murmur of assent, you walked with them among the paths, though your feet brought you back to the roses every time. You learned the king brought them from Lothering, now seared from the face of the earth despite efforts to reclaim it. A simple cutting, preserved by a soft, gentle sentiment and the earnest magic of a friend.

 _Dalish_ , the king said of that friend, and you did not have to guess at their identity; the Wardens had long since installed the new tomb at Weisshaupt. He had locked the letter away in the left-hand drawer of his desk and hadn’t looked at it since. You knew not to pry.

 _They’re beautiful, and the sentiment was lovely,_ you chose to say instead, tempting fate by reaching out to cradle one of the blossoms. A late bloom at this time of year, but the loveliest of all the flowers in the garden. _A dear thought that brought these all the way here to us today, one for which I’m thankful._

 _You think so?_ The king smiled wistfully, and the queen hummed and sank down on a nearby bench, her eyes fixed on you instead of the roses. _That is…a really kind thought, too. I didn’t expect that._

 _They’re fine roses, Alistair._ The queen’s exasperation sounded almost fond and quite gentle. _He can’t stay away from them, see?_

Your face began to warm despite your efforts to relax. You were helpless to the blush spreading across your cheeks as she schooled her own expression into something cool and unruffled. There was still a twinkle in her eyes that you would have liked to ask about, had it been proper. You don’t think she would have scolded you had you mentioned it.

The king grinned, nodding at the blossom you still cradled in one hand and told you how he admired the flower that had, even in the middle of all sorrow and darkness, survived to see this garden. _Still bloomed even after all that, didn’t it? Ah, careful with the thorns...your hands!_

But you barely felt the sting of the thorns in your thumbs, as the king and queen tried to call you away from the roses, because you couldn’t tear your gaze away from the blossom in your hands for all that you tried. Your cheeks were surely ablaze in the low summer heat, like the last roses of Highever you never got to see. There were still thorns in you, on sprawling stems, prickly, numerous, and still very shy. You were waking up after a long, long season of winter, and your heart was blooming in the king and queen’s garden.


End file.
